During the [intlink id="136" type="post"]Super App webcast[/intlink] Mike Kirkup covered many questions from the attendees. I have gathered many of those in the webcast summary. He did not get through all of the questions and promised to answer all of the questions on blackberry development forum. He did just that and here is the Q&A extracted:

[Q] The problem I found with a super app that was tightly integrated with the address book is that people were looking to see an icon and not something that was just part of the existing BlackBerry UI.

[A] A good point. Many users will still expect a simple icon for the application whether only to provide information on how to leverage the application or how to manipulate settings. Fixmo is a really good example of this point.

[Q] Is there a way for my app to get notified when new notifications are shown on the device?

[A] Yes. Check out JSR 135 (MMAPI) for more information on how to include the camera field within your application including the ability to modify zoom and flash settings.

[Q] With the definition of a "Super App" being one that you cannot live without, can a game be a super app?

[A] Great question! Yes, a game definitely can be a "Super App" or take on many of the characteristics of a Super App including being notification driven, contextual (even location based), integrated with other applications and so on. It isn't hard to imagine having a game that you love so much that you can't live without it.

[Q] Can I make a Super App by developing a BlackBerry Widget?

[A] Yes, definitely. One of the most important attributes of the our Widget technology is that you can fully integrate your Widget into all of the same APIs that are available to Java applications whether exposed already through Javascript APIs or through your ability to write Javascript to Java APIs.

[Q] Do you plan on setting up a program to certify applications as Super Apps?

[A] No, we do not currently have any plans for certifying applications as a Super App today. The concept here is to help people really understand not only the capabilities of the BlackBerry platform but also the possibilities on better engaging your users.

[Q] We have developed a collaboration application which works on a "pull" basis. How can we leverage push?

[A] Check out our newly launched Push Services page for more information on how you can start leveraging push in your application whether for the enterprise or consumers.

[Q] Is it possible to add a custom menu item in any third party application?

[A] Yes, although not in a granular fashion today. As part of the ApplicationMenuItem API you can specify that you want your menu item included in all applications on the device but you do not get to pick which applications if you don't want all apps. Can you submit a feature request in the Developer Issue Tracker if you think this is a good use case.

[Q] Suppose the application flow is such that screen 1 pushes screen 2, screen 2 pushes screen 3 and from screen 3 the user needs to go to screen 1. Should the application push screen 1 again or pop screens to get to screen1?

[A] You should definitely maintain the proper ordering of the screens on the stack for the user such that your application will automatically pop off the top screen on the stack when the user presses the escape key. So, in this case, it depends on your ultimate goal of the screens.

[Q] This is a great presentation but it gives very little to seasoned developers. Will you have additional presentations with more details and more code samples? (Editor: this, I think is actually my question slightly rephrased)

[A] Yes, definitely. This is the introduction to the concept of Super Apps and you will see additional webinar presentations that go into substantially more detail on all of the key aspects of bringing Super Apps characteristics to your application. The Big Ideas, Little Screens UI Webinar from Brian this month is a perfect example of more involved webinars.

[Q] What are the OS or device requirements for the Javascript examples provided?

AT&T will host a webcast about building secure mobile applications on April 1-st. It's interesting to see how the mobile ecosystem is going crazy right now, every brand trying to get as much people involved as possible.

You may need to know your iPhone or iPod Touch device ID (or UUID or also known as UDID) for many reasons. Whatever reasons those are there are couple of very easy ways to find out what is your iPhone or iPod Touch device ID.

I've just read a post at Coding Horror - Jeff Atwood's popular blog where he goes into the problem that many candidates applying for a programming job simply can not program. He claims that it's almost all of the applicants, which I find hard to believe. I tend to think that their resume evaluation techniques are just not good enough, which is surprising since Jeff is good friends with Joel Spolsky who had an interesting article about screening resumes.

Anyways, Jeff's article is not about that. It's about a little nifty tool that will allow you to see other person type. It's very simple you give your interviewee a link and open a link in your browser and can see everything the other person types with a couple seconds lag. This tool is definitely nice, but hell, why not just use google wave? It's easy, many technical people should already have it. If the programmer applying doesn't have it and doesn't have a good reason as to why this is so you should think twice about putting further time and effort in the interview process.

Mike is a great speaker and a great guy in general. BlackBerry developers are truly blessed with Mike in that sense. So much has been done to ease up on the [intlink id="75" type="post"] hurdles of BlackBerry development[/intlink] recently that it is becoming cool to be BlackBerry developer once again.

Mike was give the stage and he went over the BlackBerry super app concept which was similar to the [intlink id="136" type="post"]BlackBerry super app concept webcast[/intlink] he gave recently but a little different of course with some stuff oriented more towards developers.

The highlight was of course the free panel Q&A session which was afterwards. Mike, as usual, did a very nice job answering the questions of the many developers who brought up interesting questions.

Upcoming Products

BES Express (or BESX) which is the free, striped down version of the BES server. This will allow smaller businesses to put their employees on BESX without hesitation which originated from the costs of licensing associated with putting employees on BES.

[intlink id="168" type="post"]Upcoming WebKit browser[/intlink] which will be blazing fast and super blazing fast for JavaScript.

There will be no iPad like device.

"No iPad, no BlackPad, BluePad, RedPad etc..."

Advertising APIs. Right now RIM is conducting a closed beta with their partners and should be soon available to all independent developers. There is no cap on the volume, meaning pretty much anyone would be able to integrate advertising in their apps.

Push APIs (well this is not an upcoming event actually, it went live today at 9am). Push API is available to everyone now and is free!

App World 2.0 will soon be launched. The next version of the app world will support not only the PayPal but also the carrier and credit cards. The share of developers will most likely be different across all the optios and across the different network operators as well. PayPal option will remain 20/80% split with 80% going to the developers.

In a few weeks the new Eclipse plugin for BlackBerry development version 1.1 should be released, which will address many issues existing in the older 1.0 browser. The official release of 1.1 which should go out of beta will be fully supporting 64 bit systems.

Upcoming Events

Very soon we would have "fast simulator experience" so painful to many developers that when announced, it was followed by applause storm. So fast simulator experience means no more restarting the simulator to load the newly compiled version. (Yey!)

More aggressive promotion of the App World. Mike mentioned that RIM intentionally kept the App World low profile for the first year letting the carriers figure out their distribution strategies.

Super App competition. The super app competition will be carried out with a different prize distribution model than previously. RIM decided instead of rewarding a few leading application with big bonuses, reward more developers with moderate bonuses. Mike mentioned that they expect 3000-4000 apps submitted to the contest (both new and existing apps can be submitted) and if your app passes the first criteria of actually being a super app, then you are already entitled to something. Mike threw out "a free device" in the air but I guess it is not yet decided. They may go with a free device or maybe discounted developer conference or maybe we could choose. Let us know in the comments what you would prefer. The prizes will be handed out at BB Dev Con in San-Francisco at fall and the submission deadline will most likely be July 1-st but this is not confirmed yet.

The painful question of over the air (OTA) OS upgrade was raised and Mike said that carriers feel fairly confident with pushing OTA OS update starting with OS 4.6 since 4.5 being the first OS where OTA OS was introduced had some issues and bugs. He mentioned that from carrier's experience OTA updates have a very high conversion rate. In the 80%-s while even the through browser+USB update is less than 20% conversion rate. Until most of the devices are 4.6 and up and carriers are more aggressive pushing updates to the devices, we will be stuck with the need to support older devices as old as 4.2.1. Which leads us to further interesting figures:

as of October 2009 the OS distribution is as follows:

4.2.1 97%

4.5 50-60% - over the air update

4.6 30%

4.7 15%

5.0 5-6%

meaning supporting 4.2.1 will get you almost all the devices, while jumping to 4.5 and up will only give you about 50-60% and by going further up to 4.6, you will loose up to 30% of devices (this is due to huge number of older Curves and Pearls).

I will be wrapping up since this post is already quite long. Leave your thought in the comments!

Update

RIM has unveiled the new upcoming BlackBerry browser based on the new WebKit engine.

At the New England BlackBerry meetup, Mike Kirkup mentioned that they are doing some neat tricks with precompiling JavaScript through MDS which makes the JavaScript blazing fast. You can see it for yourself in the embedded video.

The new WebKit browser will be available in the next OS release but the upgrade will be limited on per device manner since WebKit browser is quite resource demanding.

Just upgraded to Firefox 3.6 and I am a little annoyed by the new "feature" of tabs opening next to the tab where you open the new tab from. While this might be convenient to some people, I got used to the "old" way of handling tabs and find myself constantly wondering where this new tab is. I might give it a few more days to see whether I get used to it but in case you are annoyed by that too and want to "fix" this here is how you can disable the new “Insert Related Tab After Current” tweak in Firefox 3.6.

Type about:config in the address bar. Then, if needed click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

In the filter box – type in: tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

Right-click that about:config entry, and choose “Toggle”

This will convert Firefox back to opening a new tab from a web page on the far right of the tab bar, rather than right next to the tab you opened it from.

If you decide that you actually like it and want to switch back, follow these same steps and toggle the “false” back to “true”.

I've seen this video by Seth Godin, who is without any doubt a great thinker and visioner. This presentation by Seth, besides being very informational and interesting is quite extraordinary as well. I can not remember when I've seen a better presentation lately. Great usage of visuals and associations!

The presentation made me think about people that are successful and people who are not. And this is absolutely true - successful people ship. I've known this for all this time, but this simple 3 words "slogan" so to say never formulated in my head. Intuitively I always felt this but after this presentation it just formed.

Borrowing analogy from Math, shipping is a required condition but not satisfactory, meaning that just shipping you will not necessarily make successful, but if you DO NOT ship you will most definitely NOT be successful.

Again, very inspiring presentation that may be an eye opener for some. Enjoy!

What makes a Blackberry appliactoin to be a super app? This is the question that Mike Kirkup - head of developer relations at RIM tried to answer today in a free webcast. There has been an obsession recently with super phones and super apps as it seems. And why phones and/or apps have to be necessarily super?

So there seem to be two definitions of super apps according to Mike Kirkup.

If you take the blackberry phone from the user and he misses this app - then it is a super app since it provides an inherent value for the end user.

Another "definition" is more technical - so what are the main components that make a BlackBerry app a super app:

Always on experience

Seamless integration with 3d party apps

Notification driven

Not sure about you, but I see here a small misconception. On one side Mike says that if the application is extremely useful up to the point where if taken away from the user he will surely miss it but on the other hand there are specific points which actually make an app to be a super app. So what if the app is very useful to many people to the extent that they will surely miss it if taken away such as for example DailyHoroscope application for BlackBerry. Because many users of DailyHoroscope application are going crazy and flood us with mails in case we experience even minimal downtime. So the application is extremely useful to its users and certainly has value for them but according to the bullet points, DailyHoroscope is not a super app.

The source of confusion I think is that Mike meant if you take away BlackBerry device from the user, then other devices that may have similar apps will not be able to fill the gap. That's what makes any BlackBerry app a super app I would guess. The push mechanism and the multitasking and deep integration is something that does not exist on iPhone and/or iPod Touch, but similar things exist on Android and WebOS and Maemo are also actively developed and progressing towards richer and richer platform.

So what makes specifically BlackBerry platform a super app enabler platform accodring to RIM? The first and the point which was put most of the emphasis was the “multi-threaded OS with background apps”. Other enablers mentioned were:

Contextual integration with apps

Rich event based notification model that integrates deeply in the system

Efficient push services

Integrated LBS and Mapping

Mike argued that the possibility of deep native integration allows easier “native” application integration in a cohesive manner into the system. The main point seems to be that since the applications do not have to invent everything from scratch by using built in components/services etc, the applications can deliver unified user experience which lowers the learning curve for the applications and eliminates most of the confusion in mastering a new app.

The power of push. Mike mentioned that RIM invented the push and were running it in production for more than 10 years and they know exactly what they are doing. (hear that Apple? haha... ). The push limitation for BIS is 8KB while for BES it is much higher and is specified by BES administrator but is hard limited (by I think 1MB in the older BES versions with much higher limit value in BES 5.0 - I think around 10Mb)

Overall it was an interesting webcast and Mike did a great job talking about all the things that are great about BlackBerry platform. I personally was a little disappointed since I expected much more technical session.

Q/A Session:

Q&A session was quite interesting. Mike zipped through more than 200 questions in less than 40 minutes with great and to the point answers. Thank you Mike! I documented the most interesting Q&As to my taste and the ones that are most likely to be interesting to other developers.

When advertising will be available?

For BB alliance the beta will be opening very soon. For the rest of the publishers - the time line promised by Mike was approximately 2 month

Time for application approval?

Depends on the type of the application submitted. In general it is about 10 days but they are supposedly getting at about 48 hours time

Is the PUSH service free for all the developers?

It is free for almost all the alliance partners but they are working on releasing it to all the developers

All those super apps running in the background will make the devices slow - what about more resources for the devices?

Mike said that they will continue to innovate in the device area but the overall answer was extremely vague

More tutorials and code?

There is a lot of tutorials and code currently available online but it is hard to find it. Current knowledge base will be restructured and reorganized and mostly replaced by developer resources which is some new knowledge base.

Book for developers from RIM?

Working on that with authors and the community RIM is unlikely to release the book of its own.

Developers competition for super apps? Is it something that is coming?

RIM is planning to run super app development challenge in 4 regions very soon and pick up the best super apps and showcase them in BBDevCon in the end of September

When 5.0 JDE will be out of Beta?

5.0 JDE will be out of beta soon and will finally NOT require simulator restart to push the new build to the simulator (YEY!!! Great news, hopefully Eclipse will mirror that as well)

UI tools for GUI building

Working on UI tool which will be drag and drop tool that will generate Java code for you (That would be a blessing, although knowing how RIM executes development tools projects, the tool might very likely be quite unusable for anything more serious than placing a label field with "Hello World")

Paid applications worldwide timeline?

Worldwide is particularly difficult since RIM is supporting more than 150 countries. Support will be rolled out increasingly

Is JDE going to be phased out in favor of Eclipe?

Not right now. When RIM will feel that Eclipse has matured enough it will happen, but in general Eclipse is destined to replace the JDE

Are other development platforms going to be supported except Windows?

Mac is in the pipeline and support is likely to appear until the end of the year

App World is not as advertised as Apple's App Store

Rim will start being much more aggressive about promoting App World in the future but this is highly dependent on RIMS relations with carriers since RIM is tightly integrated with carriers and they rub each other's shoulder. (well, of course...)

Payments through carriers as opposed to payment through PayPal

App World 2.0 will have options to pay with either credit card, PayPal or through the carrier

Is Verizon's store going to compete with App World?

Not really as RIM is not competing with any of the 3d party stores like Handango, GetJar etc...

Are subscription based payments going to be supported in App World 2.0?

It is not clear exactly what it is going to be, but some sort of subscription payment will be available

What is the best cross framework to use for developing for BB? PhoneGap

PhoneGap is great but the apps built with those cross platform frameworks will not be super apps! This is not possible since those frameworks are targeting the lowest common denominator.

Suggested books?

There are 2 good books John Wargo which is more like a reference manual. Anthony Rizk is more smooth read book and is less like reference.

[amazon-product]0321647424[/amazon-product]

[amazon-product]1430230150[/amazon-product]

[amazon-product]1430272252[/amazon-product]

What is the OS version to use as the lowest common denominator for development of super apps?

4.6

Can I create a super app with SDK prior to 4.6

Yes you certainly can - many of the capabilities are available in the prior versions of the platforms

What is the process of migrating a simple app into a super app?

Think about how your simple app can take advantage of all the mentioned components that comprise a super app. Start thinking about your application and you will most likely realize that there are many ways to improve

Monitoring f uninstall of your own app - will it possible?

This is something that should be available in the next version of the next version.

Are free apps going to be able to use payments for donations?

Certainly - using in app payments is possible for that

Is advertising network be available worldwide?

Yes at the launch the advertising service will be available worldwide and then local advertising agencies will be added locally

What are you doing for developer training especially in Asia and Africa?

RIM will run BlackBerry developer days around the world. Follow our development blog for more details and updates.

Knowledge base is broken, I can not find any information there

The KB will be phased out and replaced with BB resource center

When normal developers will be able to use BIS?

This is something that RIM will be doing soon

Samples of a super apps?

Poynt app that was highlighted through MWC definitely have several characteristics of a super app

Are there any security risks with all this deep integration of the apps into the system

There is a

Where do I start with blackberry super apps development and information